I just retired my old WordPress site and rebuilt markjbrown.com as a static Jekyll site hosted on GitHub Pages. The old site had been on Azure App Service for years and was quietly costing me money to host content I wasn’t even maintaining.

A few things I like about the new setup:

  • Free hosting. GitHub Pages costs $0 for public repos.
  • No surface area to attack. No WordPress admin, no PHP, no database, no plugins to patch.
  • Git is the CMS. Writing a post is git commit && git push. Editing happens in any editor — and PRs give me a built-in review workflow.
  • The site IS the source. No more “where did I write that?” — it’s all Markdown in a public repo at github.com/markjbrown/markjbrown.github.io.

I’m planning to start writing again here — mostly about the stuff I’m working on day-to-day on the Azure Cosmos DB team: data modeling at scale, vector search, multi-agent AI patterns, and the surprises that fall out of running real workloads in distributed systems.

More soon.